MEDIPAL-

A creative solution to assist users in the process of finding proper medical care

Design Challenge

I was proposed to come up with a creative solution to help assist a grouping of patients in the medical sector, the challenge was broad and creative so I decided to evaluate untapped markets in the medical sector. As I began my exploration I reflected on my own privilege when I go to the doctors. For me, going to the doctors is easy, I have never faced much judgement or been turned away for medical care because of my appearance, race or sexuality, but as I began to research I discovered it is far to common for people to be turned away by medical care experts based on discriminatory factors. I decided to tackle how those in the LGBTQ+ community are treated in the medical sector, and how I could help improve their expereinces.

Time Constraint: 2 weeks

The Team: Just me, myself, and I!

Research

I began by researching my problem space by looking at a few secondary resources in order to affirm my hypothesis that there was a lack of sensitivity and understanding surrounding LGBTQ+ healthcare. My affirmations mainly stemmed from an article I found regarding the treatment of LGBTQ+ patients, in the article it was outlined that patients who identify to doctors, and nurses and midwives are often not understood, not respected, and sometimes not treated.

Once my hypothesis was affirmed I decided to do some field research on participants in order to better understand the pain points of these types of patients and their experiences with the medical sector. I interviewed 5 different participants in the LGBTQ+ community in order to better understand what they go through when seeking different aspects of care.

Key Insights

Lack of training surrounding LGBTQ+ health issues

Anxiety and lack of trust of healthcare professionals

Accessibility to healthcare professionals

In my findings a key theme that reoccurred was that patients wanted to be able to know more about a health care professional before they went to see them, specifically patients wanted to know if the doctor was male/female/non-binary.

User Stories

I developed a set of 50+ user stories to help better identify a specific task my user wanted to go through

"As a patient I want to be able to read reviews about the doctor I am seeing so that I can know what they are like as a doctor before I visit them"

"As a patient I want to be able to find hassle free clinics near by me so that I can find a safe space for my medical needs"

"As a patient I want to be able to see a female doctor because I feel more comfortable with women then men"

How might we help connect patients with healthcare professionals that best suit their needs and wants?

Persona Development

After I identified the pain points and needs of patients, I developed a user persona named Aleki to structure my design solution around.

Aleki's Task Flow

After developing Aleki, I wanted to know what it would look like for them to use a solution to help them solve finding a female only family doctor in their area. It was assumed while designing that Aleki would be signing up for the app, and that the purpose of a sign up process was so that in future iteration and development of MediPal, Aleki would be able to book an appointment in the app after finding a healthcare provider that suited their needs.

Sketches

After developing a core flow to work off of, I began sketching out lo-fi wireframes of what that task would look like when applied as a digital solution.

Digital Iteration

After sketching, I created some lo-fi wireframes and stitched them together in Invision in order to carry out user testing. I originally created a solution that used the 'tinder model' as a for patients to swipe through health care providers in order to find the right one for them, however users really did not like this they found it 'impersonal' and 'unprofessional', so with that feedback in mind I went back to the drawing board and created a different ideation all together which allowed users to find health care professionals in their area, based on a criteria of wants, and then read reviews about the health care provider in question.

Conclusion

I hope to expand MediPal in the future to allow users to go through the full process of booking an appointment with a medical care professional. This project was extremely insightful as it helped me understand the deep amount of work that goes into UX research, it also taught me it is extremely important as a designer to be empathetic to your user and to never fall in love with my own designs, because as user testing taught me they may not always be as effective as I think they are!